The 1933 plebiscite: how silence approved Salazar's constitution

On Sunday 19 March 1933, polling stations opened across mainland Portugal and the Atlantic islands, as a rule one for each parish. In Lisbon and Porto the old electoral assemblies had been split into sections of no more than 2,000 voters. The ballot was a plain rectangle of white paper, 15 centimetres by 10, with one printed question: “Aprova a Constituição Política da República Portuguesa?” Do you approve the Political Constitution of the Portuguese Republic?1 source1 source

The instructions were unusual. A voter who agreed was to hand the paper in with nothing written on it. A voter who disagreed had to write the word “Não”, no, on the ballot.1 source1 source

Only three excuses for staying away were accepted: the death of a close relative in the three days before the vote, an illness that made it impossible to attend, or absence from the municipality since 12 March. The excuse had to be proved to the polling-station officials before the count began. Any other registered head of family who stayed at home was counted as a yes.1 source1 source

Three weeks later, on Sunday 9 April, a panel of judges and officials met in the Council of Ministers' room at the Ministry of the Interior in Lisbon to close the count. Its chairman was the president of the Supreme Court, Eduardo Augusto de Sousa Monteiro. The panel declared the Constitution approved by 1,292,864 votes to 6,190.1 source1 source

The minutes appeared in the official gazette on 11 April, and the Constitution took effect that day. It founded the Estado Novo, or New State, the dictatorship that ruled Portugal until 1974.3 sources3 sources

A military coup on 28 May 1926 had ended Portugal's parliamentary First Republic. Under the generals, the republican Constitution of 1911 stayed in force only in theory, changed at will by government decree, and there was no parliament until 1935.1 source1 source

The dictatorship put down a series of republican revolts, beginning in Porto and Lisbon in February 1927. After each one it strengthened the police, tightened repression and deported its leading opponents to the colonies.1 source1 source

António de Oliveira Salazar joined the government as finance minister in 1928, under General Vicente de Freitas. Between 1928 and 1930 he and his allies broke with the conservative republican officers who saw the dictatorship as a temporary clean-up. In 1930 he founded the União Nacional (National Union) to gather the regime's supporters, and he insisted it was not a party. On 5 July 1932 President Óscar Carmona appointed him head of government.2 sources2 sources

Salazar wanted a regime that was neither a liberal democracy nor a totalitarian state. In 1932 he said the new constitution rejected democratic and parliamentary foundations and the “abstractions” of popular sovereignty, while limiting the state's power by “morality and law” and by respect for individual and corporative rights. Outside the União Nacional, he added, the state recognised political freedoms, but it would not tolerate offences against the government's work or the aims of the Constitution.1 source1 source

No elected assembly wrote the 1933 Constitution. The draft was Salazar's, prepared with a small group of collaborators, among them the Coimbra law professor Domingos Fezas Vital, Quirino de Jesus and the young Marcello Caetano.3 sources3 sources

Early versions had the president and parliament chosen by corporatist suffrage, with people voting through their professions and interest groups instead of as individuals. Salazar and a council of notables, the National Political Council, which first met to discuss his draft on 5 May 1932, changed a great deal before the text was put to public debate on 28 May 1932. That version proposed a legislature of 90 deputies, half elected directly and half by corporatist suffrage.2 sources2 sources

It drew fire from several sides. Republican army officers objected to corporatist representation. The monarchists of Integralismo Lusitano and Francisco Rolão Preto's National Syndicalists, a home-grown fascist movement, thought it gave too much ground to liberalism. The Catholic Church was more concerned that the text did not mention God. President Carmona and Salazar argued mainly about how power would be divided between them.2 sources2 sources

The statutes of the União Nacional, approved in May 1932, were published through the Ministry of the Interior on the eve of the draft's publication. The legal historian Paulo Ferreira da Cunha sees a concerted strategy. The government prepared the ground in other ways too. In 1932 it sent “crimes of rebellion” to special military courts, and it ordered schools to print approved maxims in textbooks and hang them on classroom walls, among them a line of Salazar's: “The will to obey is the only school for learning to command.”3 sources3 sources

The final text was a compromise. Article 5 made Portugal “a unitary and corporative Republic”, but the president and the National Assembly were both to be elected by direct suffrage, and the corporatist principle went into a separate chamber that could only give advice. Salazar himself admitted the gap between the text and the ideal he had set out.3 sources3 sources

Decree 22:229, signed on 21 February 1933 by Carmona, Salazar and every minister, set the date and the rules. The draft was printed in a supplement to the official gazette the next day. Municipal councils had to send copies to every parish, and parish officials had to post them in a public place by 12 March.2 sources2 sources

The vote used the political electoral register of 1932, which held 1,330,258 names. The rules for registering came from a decree of 5 May 1931: a man over 21 qualified if a public-exam certificate showed he could read, write and count, or if he paid at least 100 escudos in certain taxes. A woman over 21 qualified only with a secondary-school or university diploma. The plebiscite decree made voting compulsory for registered voters who were heads of family.3 sources3 sources

The decisive rule was article 4. The Constitution would pass if, when the count closed, a majority of all registered voters, not of those who voted, had given it a “concordant vote”. Because every unexcused head of family who stayed away counted as concordant, a voter who disagreed had one way to say so: go to the polling station and write “Não”.1 source1 source

The official minutes give five figures. Of 1,330,258 registered voters, 1,292,864 were counted as approving the Constitution, 6,190 rejected it and 666 ballots were void. A further 30,538 were recorded as voters who took no part or whose returns were missing.1 source1 source

What the minutes do not say is how many of the 1,292,864 approvals were blank ballots and how many were people who stayed at home. Under article 4 the two were the same thing, and the count never separated them. Nor do the minutes say how many of the 1,330,258 registered voters were heads of family, the only people the tacit-yes rule covered.2 sources2 sources

Paulo Ferreira da Cunha calls it a vote whose results are still uncertain, in which abstentions counted as favourable votes. The Assembleia da República's history of the period puts the electorate at about 1.3 million and says abstentions and blank ballots both counted for the Constitution.2 sources2 sources

The count covered the colonies too, unevenly. The minutes record returns from the mainland, the Atlantic islands, São Tomé and Portuguese India, and none at all from Cape Verde, Guinea, Angola, Mozambique, Macau or Timor.1 source1 source

The text opened with Portugal's territory, from the mainland and its islands to Angola, Mozambique, Portuguese India, Macau and Timor. Article 5 based the “unitary and corporative Republic” on the equality of citizens before the law. In the same article, equality allowed exceptions for women: “the differences resulting from their nature and from the good of the family”.1 source1 source

Article 8 listed rights familiar from liberal constitutions: freedom of expression in any form, freedom of belief, of teaching, of assembly and of association, and no imprisonment without charge except in listed cases. Its second paragraph handed the main freedoms to “special laws”.2 sources2 sources

Until 1974, the historian Irene Flunser Pimentel notes, the government and its political police maintained that article 8 was respected and that nobody was jailed for their ideas. In their account, people were arrested only for organising to overthrow the legal order that the same Constitution had set up.1 source1 source

In practice the head of government held the power. Ministers answered to the President of the Council, he answered only to the President of the Republic, and the Assembly had no say in appointing or dismissing either. Over time, Ferreira da Cunha argues, Salazar's dominance and the 1959 revision turned the system into a “presidentialism of the prime minister”.2 sources2 sources

The issue of the Diário do Governo that carried the plebiscite minutes on 11 April also carried six decree-laws. One regulated the right of assembly. Another, Decree-Law 22:469, regulated prior censorship of printed publications. A third republished the Colonial Act, the law governing the empire, as article 132 of the Constitution required.1 source1 source

The political police followed. On 29 August 1933 Decree-Law 22:992 merged two existing forces into the Polícia de Vigilância e Defesa do Estado (PVDE). Its main task was the repression of communism, and it worked with foreign police forces. In 1945 it became the PIDE.1 source1 source

On 23 September 1933 six decree-laws, led by the National Labour Statute, set up the corporatist labour system. Free trade unions had to adopt state-approved statutes or dissolve, and stopping work to win better conditions became punishable. The Statute owed much to the Labour Charter of Mussolini's Italy, tempered by Catholic social teaching. The unions answered with an attempted revolutionary general strike on 18 January 1934, which was harshly repressed.3 sources3 sources

The first National Assembly was elected in 1934 and met in 1935. Men over 21 could vote if they could read or, failing that, paid at least 100 escudos in tax; women needed a secondary, higher or special diploma. Political prisoners and anyone holding ideas “contrary to the existence of Portugal as an independent state” were barred from standing, and every seat went to the União Nacional's list.2 sources2 sources

Three of the 90 deputies were women, the first in a Portuguese parliament: the doctor Domitila de Carvalho, the lawyer Cândida Parreira and Maria Guardiola, rector of the Maria Amália girls' lycée. Carvalho, born in 1871, had been the first woman to study at the University of Coimbra. Parliament's biographical record describes her as a monarchist, a devout admirer of Salazar and sceptical of feminism.3 sources3 sources

The Constitution was amended often, always by law or decree. Ferreira da Cunha lists revisions by law in 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1945, 1951 and 1959, and another by decree-law in 1961. The last came in 1971.2 sources2 sources

The 1945 revision let the government issue decree-laws even when there was no urgency, which made it the country's normal lawmaker. The Corporative Chamber's opinion on the change said so openly.1 source1 source

The 1959 revision came after General Humberto Delgado's presidential campaign of 1958 drew mass support. The president would no longer be elected by the people but by an electoral college of deputies, members of the Corporative Chamber and representatives of the municipalities and colonies.1 source1 source

Women won the vote on the same terms as men only with a law of 26 December 1968, and even then the vote was limited to people who could read and write. Marcello Caetano's revision of 1971 kept power concentrated in the President of the Council and the President of the Republic, and many deputies of the reformist “liberal wing” later resigned their seats.2 sources2 sources

The National Assembly met for the last time, without a quorum, on the morning of 25 April 1974, as the Armed Forces Movement's coup brought the regime down. On 14 May the Junta of National Salvation abolished the Assembly and the Corporative Chamber. The same day it kept the 1933 Constitution provisionally in force wherever it did not contradict the Movement's programme. A new Constitution was approved on 2 April 1976.3 sources3 sources

The 1933 text is the only Portuguese constitution approved by popular vote, the Assembleia da República notes. Every later change to it was made by law or decree-law, without consulting the voters.2 sources2 sources

For Ferreira da Cunha, what matters most is the distance between what the text promised and what the regime did. He calls the 1933 Constitution an “inauthentic” text, borrowing Adriano Moreira's word: it proclaimed rights that censorship, the political police, the ban on parties and the ordinary laws then took away. He finds the written text less anti-liberal than the regime's ideology, and the regime's practice correcting that.1 source1 source

The plebiscite fits the same pattern. The count produced an overwhelming majority, but the decree that set it up had already decided that silence meant consent.2 sources2 sources